J.K. Rowling, the author of the famous Harry Potter series, has taken the bestseller lists across the world by storm with her new book Harry Potter and the Cursed Child. It has charted in the top three in nine of the 10 Nielsen territories bestseller lists (February 2016 to February 2017).
The book generated the most sales in the United States, with 4.4 million copies sold. That said, one in every 45 Britons bought a copy in the eight months after its release, a striking figure for a medium-sized country. The Cursed Child makes up about half of Rowling’s UK value and 65% of her US volume. It helped drive up the sales of the original Harry Potter books as well. Her screenplay for Fantastic Beasts and Where to find them also sold well (370,724 copies in the UK and 690,336 units in the US).
The top 10 selling authors for the UK are mostly British, with only one American (James Patterson). The Americans, in reverse, only have two Britons (Rowling and Paula Hopkins). Yet, Rowling topped both lists.
Source: “Rowling rules the roost”, Kiera O’Brien, The Bookseller Daily, P.10
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- Harper Lee, the elusive novelist whose child’s-eye view of racial injustice in a small Southern town, “To Kill a Mockingbird,” became standard reading for millions of young people and an Oscar-winning film, has died.
- To Kill a Mockingbird,” published in 1960, is the story of a girl nicknamed Scout growing up in a Depression-era Southern town. A black man has been wrongly accused of raping a white woman, and Scout’s father, the resolute lawyer Atticus Finch, defends him despite threats and the scorn of many.
- The book quickly became a best-seller.
- By 2015, its sales were reported by HarperCollins to be more than 40 million worldwide, making it one of the most widely read American novels of the 20th century.
- “Now, 75 years later in an abundant society where people have laptops, cellphones, iPods, and minds like empty rooms, I still plod along with books,” she wrote.
- By 2014, she had given in to the digital age and allowed her novel to come out as an e-book, calling it “‘Mockingbird’ for a new generation.”
- A new play adaptation of “To Kill a Mockingbird” will land on Broadway during the 2017-18